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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
The meeting and song exchange of Lycidas and Simichidas in Theocritus' seventh Idyll, the Thalysia, has a fair claim to be among not only the most discussed but also the most powerful and strangely compelling scenes of all Greek poetry. Its hold over us lies in part not merely in the familiar attractiveness of the mysterious and riddling, but also in our pervasive sense of witnessing a dramatization of changing fashion, and one in which the present confronts, but perhaps fails to meet the challenge of, the past. In this chapter, I want to look anew at certain aspects of this encounter in the light of the central themes of this book in the hope of teasing out some strands of Hellenistic reflection upon poetic and cultural practice.
THINKING ABOUT STYLE
As the narrator, Simichidas, and his friends are walking from the town of Cos to a harvest festival in the countryside, they happen to fall in with Lycidas (but is it “chance”?), who is very obviously a goatherd (or is he?). Both Lycidas and Simichidas are poets, and they agree to an exchange of “bucolic song” as they travel together. Lycidas introduces his song as follows (Idyll 7.42–51):
So, with a purpose, did I speak, and the goatherd answered, sweetly laughing, “I will give you my stick, because you are a young shoot all fashioned by Zeus for truth. So I abhor the builder who seeks to raise his house as high as the peak of Mt. Oromedon, and the cocks of the Muses who labor in vain, crowing against the Chian songster. […]
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